Farmers to observe “nationwide” bandh tomorrow in protest against new farm laws
By Yudhvir Singh*
We farmers have been demanding fair and remunerative prices for the past four decades. The Bharatiya Janata Party government made election promises of doubling farmers’ incomes. Instead of fulfilling that promise, we are being slapped with these bills designed to end the government’s responsibility to ensure a fair price to farmers.
When seen in totality, these bills have nothing to do with improving farmers’ incomes, over 80% of whom are small and marginal farmers. Instead, they will empower agribusiness and increase corporate control of our food systems, leaving farmers and consumers with little recourse to justice.
Also read: “The two farm bills are actually a surgical strike on the system of middlemen”
Below we briefly post our opposition to each of these bills:-
1. The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, 2020: This bill is designed to slowly kill the APMC system through its ‘One Country, Two Markets’ approach. The government insists that the APMC system will still remain and that it is only creating an additional ‘trading area,’ one without any regulation or taxes. But, when two different and parallel marketing systems are created, one with regulation and taxes, and one without, it is obvious that private players, agents, and traders will choose the latter system, making the APMCs redundant over time. The same structures will be recreated outside, this time without any regulation. This, in itself, will lead to the slow death of the APMCs.
Until today, despite the existence of APMCs, only about 36% of produce was traded within the APMCs. There is a severe shortage of mandi’s across the country. We agree that these APMC’s had several problems, but these should have been improved. The APMC model worked well for farmers in states like Punjab and Haryana. It could have been replicated across the country for various crops, with improvements in the existing shortcomings, where guaranteed MSP would be provided to farmers. At least in the APMCs, we farmers could organize and defend ourselves against different types of exploitation.
This will not be the case with unregulated trade areas. There is no guarantee that prices above MSP will be paid in these deregulated markets. Seeing the existing example of Bihar, where the APMC was removed in 2006 with much fanfare, over a decade later, we see that farmers have received prices much lower than MSP!1
Therefore, we demand that our right to remunerative prices is guaranteed, and totally unregulated markets are not permitted.
2. Essential Commodities Act (Amendment) Bill 2020: This bill will allow hoarding and market manipulation by private players and agribusiness companies.
The government claims that this bill will increase investment in post-harvest infrastructure and will improve farmers incomes. Still, farmers never had any restrictions on stockholding before this bill. The limits were there on private entities to prevent them from hoarding and speculating on food.
In the name of farmers, this bill will help agribusiness companies like Adani and Reliance to buy up all our produce at a low price, or worse, import it from other countries, and hoard large quantities freely since there will be no limit on stocks. They can easily manipulate markets and maximize profits with such large stocks, over which the government will not even have any information. The poor across the country are destined to suffer most due to such hoarding and speculative practices and spikes in food prices. The government is clearly protecting the interests of large private players who will most benefit.
3. Farmers (Empowerment & Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020: Most of India’s farmers are small and marginal, and several are illiterate. Contract farming arrangements with farmers in India are mostly unwritten and therefore unenforceable. Even when they are written, farmers don’t always understand what is written in these agreements. Individual farmers are still the weaker player in comparison to a large company. Such contracts, often geared towards market-oriented commodities that require intensive farming, compromise the ecology as well. Evidence shows that “sponsors” don’t like the deal with many small and marginal farmers and are only interested in working with medium and large farmers.
When such players don’t fulfill the contract, then farmers have no ability to dispute them, especially since most contracts are unwritten and unenforceable. This bill makes the entire contract to be voluntary, it does not even mandate that written and formal agreements be made! The bill has nothing to do with empowering farmers, it will only further weaken them. A so called “Production Agreement” in this bill is a proxy route to allow direct corporate farming, turning farmers into laborers on their own fields, putting stringent requirements on them to meet exact standards, without any guarantee of minimum price to farmers. This clause will further allow for third party enforcement to protect the corporates!
The new legislations passed by the government will destroy Indian agriculture and its millions of small-scale farmers. This move will facilitate the handover of the entire sector to agribusiness corporate. It will lead to abolishing minimum support price to the farmers, the complete destruction of the public distribution system, promoting unscrupulous traders, and giant corporations to hoard food, thus artificially creating food scarcity, sending prices up astronomically. These legislations severely threaten India’s food sovereignty and security.
Farmers need the freedom to fix the price for our produce and not the freedom to sell our produce to big corporates.
We, the farmers, are today gravely worried about the anti-farmer bills that have been suddenly introduced via the emergency measure of ordinances, in an undemocratic manner without any parliamentary discussion, standing committee deliberation, or consultation with farmers organizations. We oppose both the process and the substance of these bills. We call for a Nationwide bandh on the 25th to show our opposition and solidarity.
*The writer is the national convener of Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements, a “non-partisan” national alliance of farmers movements representing 12 farmers’ organizations across India based in UP, MP, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and Haryana.. The views expressed are personal.
